In the mobile Internet Protocol (IP) world there currently is not any special treatment for messages that are addressed to multiple mobile nodes, e.g., Broadcast and Multicast messages. So, if a home agent (i.e., software that acts on behalf of mobile nodes assigned to the home agent to facilitate the communication of messages to and from the mobile nodes) receives a Broadcast or Multicast packet, it tunnels the packet down each and every unicast tunnel for all the mobile nodes that it is serving. This solution works well when there are not many mobile nodes, or when the mobile nodes are mostly in their home subnet, but when the number of mobile nodes increases and some are in foreign subnets served by foreign agents, this solution becomes clearly inefficient and causes an unnecessary waste of the network bandwidth. Also when multiple mobile nodes are connected to the same foreign agent, the foreign agent will receive multiple copies of the Broadcast or Multicast packet over multiple unicast tunnels and will send multiple copies out on its subnet to the mobile nodes. The mobile nodes will thus end up receiving multiple copies of the same packet, and will need to deal with the copies. This is again inefficient use of the network bandwidth and of the processing resources of the mobile nodes.
Thus, what is needed is a method and system for handling messages addressed to multiple mobile nodes. The method and system in some embodiments can reduce the network bandwidth and processing resources required to handle such messages.